My Teaching Journey_English

Just a few hours away from celebrating The World Book Day, I can’t help publishing a post in honour to my favourite English Playwright, who accompanied me from my teenage years, without being aware of it.  Thanks to whom I discovered how passionate theatre is,  that there still exists some families similar to The Montague and The Capulet ones, that we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and that life could be a comedy or a tragedy, it just depends on us, the players on a stage.  Does it ring a bell, who my favourite writer is?

Back into 1998, without knowing what was going to happen almost twenty years later, William Shakespeare turned up into my life and the life of my 39 classmates at school. Our Spanish Language and Literature teacher got our class into the topic of XVI Century theatre, and among some readings, we had to work on one of the well-known plays which, in fact,  one that could get the attention of a group of forty teenagers, i.e. ROMEO AND JULIET.

Back in those years, although Internet wasn't trendy and not many people had computers at home to hand in school projects, there were innovative teachers who applied the collaborative and inclusive methods in lesson planning. Learning by doing and project-based lessons are not just a modern methodology; it dates back to those great influencers from the 90s.
The proof is in the pudding. I remembered having the same teacher two years later, a new project on Shakespeare was approaching and at that moment the chosen one was HAMLET. It was just there when we had a first-hand meeting on how arduous it was to be an actor in a theatre performance.
We had to perform the ACT II-SCENE I- Yes!  That famous Shakespearean soliloquy that says ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’
When I say that in those years we also had inclusive methodologies and learning by doing strategies is because, within this project, we had to organise, in groups, everything that involved the theatrical production. i.e. choosing the characters, a team for sound and special effects, set design including the stage props – cared in detailed by our families, any collaboration from friends, aunties, uncles, cousins, neighbours was welcomed. Looking for the theatre to perform our play wasn't a difficult issue, from the first day we've chosen our school hall.
Thanks Goodness, I was HORATIO and not HAMLET.